


Everything means something

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Jewel in the Crown (TV)
Genre: Class Differences, Crushes, Gen, Not Entirely Bookverse Compatible, POV Second Person, The Great Idfic Virus of Winter 2016/17
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-17 22:22:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9348935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: In which you've somehow developed a very unfortunate crush on your supervisor for the World History and Empire paper.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts).



> havisham was kind enough to bookmark a _Jewel in the Crown_ fic of mine with this comment: 'The first Jewel in the Crown fic in existence (as far as I know -- it's very possible that there is a Guy Perron/Reader fic stashed behind someone's math notebook though.)' 
> 
> Well. If that's not a challenge I don't know what is. There is, however, no maths notebook in this fic.

It's ridiculous, someday someone's going to notice, and you'll want to evaporate, leaving a small pile of you-oxide behind (that's not how evaporation works, is it? O-level Chemistry seems centuries ago), maybe (oh God) someone has already noticed that whereas any old slacks and sweater will do for the rest of your supervisions, for _his_ you always wear your best, supplemented with something quirky from a jumble sale or the market, something you hope he'll comment on, like the paisley scarf that led him into a five minute digression on Oxfam shopping: _coats are quite all right, but for some reason trousers are inconceivable, don't you agree?_ Despite being able to count the number of brand-new garments you have owned in your life on the fingers of one hand and have some digits left over, you swallowed dryly, and agreed. Maybe _he's_ noticed. You would actually die, no joke.

Even seeing his name painted on the blackboard at the foot of the staircase makes your pulse speed, your face warm and your chest tighten. You remember the first time you said it aloud, stressing the second instead of the first syllable: how were you to know, first kid from your sink of a dump to make it to Cambridge since the days when it was still a grammar school, but you still clench your fists and try to jostle the memory out of your head. You've practised saying his surname casually, prefixed by a couple of dismissive adjectives, but when it comes to it you choke like you've got strep throat and your cheeks flare. It is amazing that no-one's noticed. As far as you know. Most of your supervisors are Dr Something, but he never managed to pick up a PhD; the _Mr_ is a glamorous mark of distinction: he watched history being made while others inkily swotted it up in libraries. You know his birthdate, that's on book jackets. He's thirty-nine years older than you, eight older than your dad, eighteen younger than your granddad. That doesn't matter, he belongs to a different world, where people age slower and live infinitely fuller lives. You know that he was an NCO during the war, having steadfastly refused a commission, you know his contradictorily Arthurian middle names. Everyone knows those things. You wish that there was something that only you knew.

You stamp out your cigarette and try to dry your palms on your coat. The first and only time you shook hands with him, at your interview, his hand was hard, cool and dry, beautifully kept, and yours was a spongy infant swamp of hangnails and bleeding cuticles. You climb the spiral stone stairs, each worn down in the middle by centuries of undergraduate feet. Perhaps the English Martyrs felt like this: curiously elated to know they were about to be strangled, disembowelled and ripped to shreds for Love. When you told him you were brought up Catholic he said, lightly but with every appearance of genuine interest, 'Really? English recusancy fascinates me. And of course you're from Lancashire, aren't you?'

'Yes,' you said, inanely. 'I mean, no. I'm from York. And not. Recusant. My grandmother converted and took her daughters with her. My dad's family are nothing. C of E.'

'Oh,' he said, vaguely. 'Oh yes, I see.'

(Chris, whose background is if anything humbler than your own, but who took to Cambridge life like _a buck to farting, darling_ and flounces along to supervisions in an embroidered silk smoking-jacket that reeks of mothballs, said you should have just gone along with it, invented a direct line of descent from the Pendle Witches.)

You can hear voices behind the door. You perch in the window seat. It seems like a very long time before Tom Cox bursts out, red-faced and white-lipped. Tom went to Chillingborough. He's a Maoist.

'All right?' you venture, aware that the last time you talked to him you were both pissed and he went off on one about you being a 'liberal,' which is apparently a very bad thing to be.

'Mm. Quite all right, thank you.' _Quait oll rait_. You almost giggle, you'll never get used to the vowels, but manage to nod sympathetically. As Tom disappears down the stairs you hear him mutter viciously, 'Fucking old imperialist fucking _fucker_.' It only makes you love _him_ all the more.

You knock.

'Come in!'

Your hand's so sweaty that for a moment you can get no purchase on the knob; you panic, but thankfully, it gives.

He's standing at the window, hands in pockets, looking out over Old Court. He turns with a smile, as if he's actually glad to see you, which can't possibly be the case. The room is heated to greenhouse temperature. One day, he explained it:  _joints, I'm afraid; and I struggle to keep my weight up when I can't get enough exercise_. Sweat springing in the nape of your neck and around your hairline, you savoured the exotic attitude to human metabolism; at home, people over fifty are fat and take no more exercise than their work gives them or (Aunty Eunice) live on grapefruit, Ryvita and cottage cheese.

'Hullo. Do sit down.' He strolls over to his threadbare, shattered armchair by the hearth ( _barbarous, isn't it, jamming that gas fire into eighteenth-century plasterwork?_ ) twitches up his trouser-legs and sits, crossing his legs and tucking his left foot behind his right calf, which you suppose is something you can do when you're six foot three. The half-inch of golden-furred shin between sock top and trouser bottom should not, you think muzzily, be a locus of sexual desire.

You take the shiny, lumpy chair reserved for undergraduate use, and wonder, as you do every week, what the blue velvet chaise longue between them gets used for.

He ruffles through the pile of essays on the small, ugly, overburdened table to his left. 'Ah, yes. I'll be interested to hear what you make of this one.'

It's a slight eccentricity: most supervisors either take in essays the evening before you meet, or demand that you read them cold. He likes to have it both ways: to read it as a piece of prose and then hear it as a piece of rhetoric.

Reading aloud is the one thing you know you can do well, that you've never feared. Your accent adds depth and pungency; much as people might take the piss sometimes, you've never once thought of modifying it. Sod that, you've got some standards.

You're really getting into your stride, one of your bravura sentences, the ones you write especially so he will beat a little tattoo on the scored, gouged wood of the chair-arm, when he holds up a long index finger. 'Hegemony. Hard g. Do carry on.'

You stagger through the rest of it, hoarse and dashed and furious with yourself. How could you not have known, hard g, you're crass, deplorable, ineducable, a napkin-ring-fish-knife-and-paper-doily striver after the sprezzatura that will always lie inches beyond your reach. He lights a Sobranie.

'Hm. What have you read _other_ than _The Hidden Ireland_? About the milieu of Burke's early intellectual formation, I mean?'

The answer to this is _nothing_. You've spent the week in passionate, righteous indignation over the suppression of the gracious, civilised society of Gaelic Munster, resolving to learn Irish properly so you can declaim Ó Rathaille at the parties you still hope you might get invited to, getting into that ridiculous argument with Doug Keatinge about the actions of 1 Para.

'Lyons?' you squeak.

'Well, that won't do.' He begins to reel off a reading list; you pat your pockets to realise that you haven't brought a pen. He extends an improbably long arm, it seems halfway across the room; at the end of it is a small, old-fashioned silver pencil.

The ends of his fingers are rougher than you might expect a don's to be; the pencil is engraved GLPP; you feel a brief impatience with the ruling-class impulse to splatter its initials all over everything, surely by their own standard that's vulgar and petty bourgeois. You scribble to his dictation on the blank reverse of the last page of your essay.

'Yes, that's probably enough, and do look at Froude, if only to take the measure of an entirely Unionist mindset.'

You hand back the pencil; this time he smiles at you over it, as your fingers touch again, you feel a momentary frisson that you'll probably spend the rest of your evening convincing yourself couldn't possibly be mutual. He's married, you saw his wife once, a broad-faced, high-complexioned, large-hipped, horsey woman, rambling across Old Court lawn (forbidden to undergraduates on pain of £10) to bring him a parcel.

'So, very well, let's get back to Warren Hastings.'

Really, it's a form of exquisite, civilised torture. You, nineteen-year-old, clammy-handed, snot-nosed, know-nothing product of Cosmo Avenue and Margaret Clitherow High School, Tang Hall, are cordially invited to tell the author of the definitive, hardly-to-be-surpassed-this-century monograph on the fall of the East India Company _what you think about Warren Hastings_. It's not quite his period, after all. You stammer, and babble, and circumlocute. He nods and encourages and frowns. You almost let yourself think _what would happen if I just stood up, leaned over, grabbed that moss-coloured tie and hauled him into a kiss, is that what people do, would we end up fucking on the blue chaise longue?_ You don't quite think that, you keep on talking, uncertainly, about the impeachment of Warren Hastings, and somehow, eventually, via Burke again, and the Nagles of Cork, about Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. 

> 'Mo ghrá go daingean tu!  
>  Lá dá bhfaca thu  
>  ag ceann tí an mhargaidh,  
>  thug mo shúil aire dhuit,  
>  thug mo chroí taitnearnh duit,  
>  d'éalaíos óm charaid leat  
>  i bhfad ó bhaile leat.'

'I don't know any more of it in Irish,' you say. 'And I only know it by rote. Down at the club, I mean, where my father drinks, there was a Kerryman who taught me how to say it. I don't think he knew what it meant any more than I did.'

'It's mesmerising. Say it again.'

You do. He leans back in the chair, rangy arms dangling over the sides, all sort of blissed-out. You don't dare look at him when you recite O'Connor's translation, addressing instead the barbarous jammed-in gas fire: _My love and my delight, the day I saw you first..._

'Well, look, I say, hospitality demands I reciprocate, doesn't it?'

He wants to show off, you realise; it's schoolboyish, rather sweet. The language must be Urdu, he speaks it fluently. The only Urdu you've ever heard was the local newsagent trying feebly to tyrannise his children; they replied in stentorian Yorkshire. (You used to have a crush on the girl, Shinaz, she's studying medicine now. The lad, Ahmed, was a bit of a waster, his father wasn't exactly wrong about that, but you liked him too.) This is pretty different: it must be old.

He finishes with a small, conductorly flourish of his right hand. He knows he's good at it: you're absurdly thrilled, to think that a gift for reading and reciting aloud is something you share. You try to imagine him at your age: impossible. Thirty, then: the white hair, through which he runs an unnecessary smoothing hand, would be fair, red-gold; the lines around his eyes and mouth would appear only when he made one of his cool, ironical grimaces; the hint of paunchy flesh at his waistband would be hard muscle, the skin lying in minute wrinkles over it; the faintly alarming lurch from the armchair ( _joints_ ) a fluid unfolding of limbs. Fucking hell, he must have been a bloody miracle, St Michael on the Mass Card Nanna gave you for your Confirmation. (She gave you £2 as well). You're almost glad he's so old: makes him a bit more human. He's looming over you, holding out a small book with brown boards. He smells of black tobacco, coal-tar soap and something else, indefinably musty, which you've come to think of as _eau de landed gentry_. You gulp a _thank you_.

'Gaffur,' he says. 'Very minor. But oddly compelling, to me at least. He served as poet to the court at Mirat in the 1760s and 70s. The bit I said to you starts on page 28. Take it with you, time's nearly up. What are you interested in for next week?'

Haltingly, you say something about Dr Leow's lectures on the Great Qing.

'Splendid. I shall have to groise rather furiously to keep up. I might even learn something, though I don't hold out any hopes of it sticking, these days. Good afternoon.'

'Yes. Sorry. Thanks. Good afternoon.' You scuttle off, clutching the book and your essay.

Back in your room, you lay the book reverently on your desk, and go to the gyp to make a cup of Nescafé. You sport your oak (who are you kidding? Who comes to visit you? Except Chris, very occasionally, and Chris, having an attention span of approximately ninety seconds, visits everyone). You sit with your coffee in one hand and the other stroking the brown boards. It's self-conscious, pretentious, you're behaving like (you hear this in Nanna's voice) _one of them daft buggers int pictures_. Briskly, you open it to page 28. 

> That boy whose eyes, when you could still see,  
>  Gaffur, were the deep wells and sudden freshets  
>  Known only to orphans, comes one last time  
>  To sit at your feet and sing. His back is broad  
>  From pulling the bow, he boasts he can outrun  
>  His own arrow, which is to cheat time.  
>  He smells of sandalwood and garlic, his farewell  
>  A song about a prince who followed his hawk  
>  To the ends of the earth, where Death, whose eyes  
>  Are the deep wells and sudden freshets known  
>  Only to orphans, flew to his fist. You drowse  
>  In the memory of his beauty, and wake to the ghost  
>  Of his hand on your knee: 'Lock the door behind me,  
>  Old blind man, live on in contentment, the loving  
>  Reproach of my regard.' The sad scholar in his cell,  
>  He of the wounded foot, he too will look on your name,  
>  Half-effaced, on a leaf that has passed through many hands,  
>  And say, 'You have forsaken me, but one day you will  
>  Have need of my withered bow-arm, my unfleet foot,  
>  For you will wish to cheat time...'

You turn to the title page. It's his own translation, of course, privately printed in an edition of 150. Something falls from the back pages: an old postcard, dusty and foxed. There's nothing written on the back. The picture, its lurid Technicolor faded to unlikely blues and mauves, shows a gazebo surrounded by dense foliage. In the bottom right-hand corner is the legend, printed in white: _Bibighar Gardens, Mayapore_. You could keep it, you think. He'd probably never miss it. It would be something of his that only you have, that only you know. You raise it to your face. It smells of black tobacco and landed gentry. You recoil in horror and self-disgust: is this where your stupid fucking infatuation has landed you: _theft_? You shove the postcard back between the pages and push the book away, grab your writing block and pen, write the date in the manner you've copied from him: Arabic numerals for the day and Roman for the month. Hell, no. You screw up the sheet and start again, writing 14th November in the childish roundhand you're desperately trying to ditch. You screw up the sheet and start again, managing a tolerably adult script this time. _Dear_ , you write, but you can't write his name, you'll have to scrawl it in later, then fold the paper without looking at it ever again. _Thank you so much for the loan of the book_. Damn. You screw up the sheet and start again, the admonitory sermons of Mrs Hill (termagant of Infants Two) upon the sin of Wasting Paper, ringing in your ears. _Thank you so much for the loan of the Gaffur. I have nothing intelligent to say, but—_ But what? But fucking _what_? You have nothing intelligent to say, and if he thinks of you at all, it is faintly to dread your hampered, inarticulate presence, acrid with the nervous sweat of the aspirant aspidistra class, in his rooms for an hour every week. Of course he knows about your idiotic crush, he tolerates it, kindly, as he has tolerated dozens before, hoping you don't do anything stupid before you get over it. You have nothing intelligent to say, and no-one intelligent will ever love you: you will never have the lover of whom you dream, with whom you will speak a private language of allusion and spend all weekend in bed. You throw down the pen, fold your arms on the desk and rest your head on them. You heave dry-eyed, wishing you could cry, but you were mocked as a child for your easy tears, and you trained yourself ruthlessly out of them at eleven years of age.

Thirteen years later, you will dare to disagree with him, radically, about something important to both of you, and you'll see he has feet of clay.

**Author's Note:**

> The fic title is from the poem by 'Gaffur' quoted in the _Raj Quartet_. Gaffur is the invention of Paul Scott. Guy Perron's 'translation' is all my own deplorable work. This fic isn't quite compatible with the version of Guy's later life given in _Staying On_. 
> 
> supervision: the one-on-one or very small group tutorials that are the most important part of Cambridge teaching, a _supervisor_ , natch, conducts them. The students write an essay each week, and at the date this fic is set, would usually have read it aloud in the supervision.
> 
> Burke: Edmund Burke, the Irish MP who led the attempted impeachment of [Warren Hastings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Warren_Hastings).
> 
>  _The Hidden Ireland_ : influential study by Daniel Corkery of Gaelic Ireland in the 18th century, with a nationalist outlook.
> 
> Aogán Ó Rathaille (c.1670–1726): Irish poet, celebrated for his laments and ferocious excoriations of the Anglicisation of Ireland.
> 
> 1 Para: murdered 14 unarmed civilians in Derry on 30th January 1972.
> 
> Lyons: F.S.L. Lyons, Irish historian. He wrote mostly about the 19th and early 20th century, so not immediately relevant to Burke.
> 
> Froude: James Anthony Froude, author of _The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century_ (1872), a bracing exercise in Unionist bigotry.
> 
> Frank O'Connor's translation of the opening of 'Caoineadh Áirt Úi Laoghaire':
> 
> My love and my delight,  
> The day I saw you first  
> Beside the markethouse  
> I had eyes for nothing else  
> And love for none but you.
> 
> I left my father's house  
> And ran away with you,  
> And that was no bad choice;  
> You gave me everything.
> 
> sport the oak: dated slang for 'close the outer door of your rooms to indicate you do not want to be disturbed'.
> 
> gyp: kitchenette
> 
> groise: to swot, Harrow slang (which I've arbitrarily decided is shared by Chillingborough).


End file.
